


let the ashes fall

by QueenWithABeeThrone



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: (for st), (for the mcu), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst, Bittersweet Reunion, Chance Meetings, Crossover Pairing, F/M, Future Fic, Hopper Lives, Not Avengers: Infinity War Compliant, Not Captain America: Civil War Compliant, canon compliant with stranger things s3, past relationship, this is david harbour’s fault, what’s an mcu canon?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-24 20:02:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20711720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenWithABeeThrone/pseuds/QueenWithABeeThrone
Summary: Porkpie Hat turns around, his head turning as if he’s checking for anyone else who might be following them. Impressive paranoia, there, she wonders where he got—She sees his face.Alexei’s face.or: Natasha meets her ex-husband in a little Indiana town. alternately, Hopper is greeted with a blast from his brainwashed Russian assassin past.





	let the ashes fall

**Author's Note:**

> title is from James Bay’s “Let It Go”.
> 
> now that I’ve written the thing, will someone else also write it for me? PLEASE???? I can’t believe the fandom hasn’t jumped on this yet come ON.

Here is a secret that only Natasha knows:

There once was a girl, and there once was a boy, and neither of them knew each other yet. The girl picked a rose and its thorn pricked her finger, and the pain was oddly sweet, because she knew one day that same thorn would prick the finger of her true love.

There once was a woman, and there once was a man, and a red red rose that bled and bled and bled. It was her blood, and his, and theirs, and soon enough other people’s as well.

There once was a spider who ate her mates and there once was a woman who might’ve eaten her love whole, rose and heart and all, if it meant he would stay, or perhaps that was their mother who ate them both. They were brother and sister, not really but in the eyes of their masters and Mother Russia, and love was a child’s tale, and roses were not meant to survive in the snow.

There once was a woman, and there once was a man, and the rose had died a long time ago, was only dead petals in the snow.

There once was a woman, and the man had left long ago. For money, for a daughter, for a lost love he hadn’t known existed.

She let him go.

She killed him.

She let him live.

She cut his throat.

Memory can play funny tricks on a person. Natasha knows this better than most, save perhaps Barnes.

But if there’s one thing she remembers perfectly well, it’s Alexei’s face, Alexei’s eyes, Alexei’s laugh. There had been a time when that laugh made her smile, made her feel like she could maybe wash the blood off her hands, maybe have this one tiny little light that the tide of blood and death could never wash out.

Well.

It did.

\--

Hawkins is a podunk little Indiana town smack-dab in the middle of goddamned nowhere. Following that logic, nothing should really happen out here. Certainly Natasha hadn’t thought anything would be amiss there when she’d recommended it as Steve and Bucky’s next destination on their romantic cross-country road trip. Hawkins Lab had shut down long ago, its building a burnt-out and broken shell of what it used to be, the stuff of ghost stories, and the two or three psychics in town were only interested in running a comic book store and writing science fiction novels about psychic girls and otherworldly monsters. There hadn’t been an incident report out of the place in well over twenty years.

There’s one now, and she’s going to have to write it.

“I shouldn’t be so surprised anymore,” she says, pressing an ice pack over Steve’s black eye. “Only you two, _only you two_, could somehow trip over a HYDRA remnant embedded in a nowhere Indiana town, without even _looking_ for it.”

“I mean, we sort of were,” says Steve. In the dim lights of the motel room that they’re renting, his bruises look a lot uglier than they really are. “Not when we got here, but then we started hearing things here and there and, well, we couldn’t just _stand by_.”

“Could’ve ‘til Sam got here,” Bucky says, poking at his metal arm and making a face when it sparks. It’s apparently locked into flipping the bird, for some godforsaken reason. “But _no_, second my name comes up this big lug’s gone and made a damn scene. Hey, Big Bird, get over here, I need an extra hand.”

“Hey, Hippie, that’s _Captain_ to you,” Sam shoots back, but he comes over anyway, yanks hard on Bucky’s metal hand to straighten the arm out.

“_Captain_ Big Bird.”

“I don’t have to take this from you, you know,” Sam says, as Bucky flips up a panel on his arm and squints down at it. “I outrank your civilian ass now.”

“I’m a fucking senior citizen and a goddamn war vet,” says Bucky. “Show me some goddamn respect.”

“He says to the _war vet._”

Natasha snorts out a laugh, then takes the ice pack off Steve’s bruise. “Did you really cause a scene the moment Bucky’s name came up?” she asks.

“Oh, he’s downplaying it,” says Steve, his tone calm and even in the way it gets when he’s past fury and into something that burns far colder than fury. “They were in a bar talking about how they were going to find him and then turn him back into their weapon, their guard dog for some project here, and the second there wasn’t anyone else left in the bar we almost got jumped. The thing was, we hadn’t even _known_ they were there.”

“So how’d you find out they were talking about you guys?” Natasha asks.

Steve shrugs. “We had help,” he says. “This one guy, he’d stayed behind, and he’d gotten us a round with a note letting us know. Took a lot of hits too, but ran off before I could talk to him.”

“Must have a good Samaritan on your side,” Natasha says.

Steve leans back. “You don’t believe that,” he says. They know each other so well.

She smiles, thin, sharp like a dagger sliding through flesh, like a thorn of a rose. “Do you know what he looked like? What the other guys looked like?” She stands up, buckles her utility belt back on. “Hell, if there’s anything you’ve found out about this little detour on your road trip, I’d be really interested to know what it is.”

\--

So here she is at Hawkins Lab, doing recon. The boys are back in their motel room, discussing strategy and SHIELD and should they call in anyone else from the Avengers, and if so who. Frankly Natasha figures they should just call Fury and let him send in some very discreet and very unknown folks with flexible moral codes, but none of them know what Fury’s new number is, or if he even has one at all.

And honestly, Barnes probably needs to kill a couple of HYDRA goons right now. Be more cathartic than throwing plates at a padded wall.

She clambers up a tree, perches on a branch with a couple of granola bars stashed away in her pants. She’s not wearing her catsuit, at the moment—it’s become too iconic, too ingrained in the public’s consciousness, and besides, it doesn’t have pockets. Her pants and grey jacket do, though, and up here in the trees she’s as invisible as the very air around her, still as stone and quiet as a mouse.

She lifts her binoculars to her eyes and squints.

Someone’s at the fence. There’s five people at the fence, in fact, and Natasha can name four of them from the files SHIELD had on the Hawkins pack: Joyce Byers, Mike Wheeler, Dustin Henderson, Steve Harrington. The fifth one has his back turned to her, and a porkpie hat obscuring his hairstyle. Damn, damn, and damn.

So the Hawkins pack is aware there’s intruders in town. She bets they’ve known since before Steve and Bucky showed up, and a look at the security feeds she hacked into shows her that they’ve even got a car full of people coming up to the front entrance—Jane Hopper’s face is clear on the feed, and beside her is Nancy Wheeler. The static surrounding the backseat makes her think Kali Prasad, and god knows who else they’re sneaking in there.

Yeah. Yeah, they’ve been planning their own sting for months. Natasha leans back against the trunk, and texts Bucky, _don’t worry, looks like the locals got it covered_. Then she lifts her binoculars to her eyes again.

Porkpie Hat’s cut a hole in the fence, and the rest of the crew’s stepping through. Joyce, who looks about sixty or so, stops for a moment before she goes up on her tiptoes and kisses Porkpie Hat. They must be splitting up, then, with Wheeler and Henderson going one way and Byers and Harrington the other, but it’s strange that they’ve left Porkpie Hat alone. Doesn’t seem to line up with what Natasha knows about them, they’re the sort to stick together like glue.

Porkpie Hat turns around, his head turning as if he’s checking for anyone else who might be following them. Impressive paranoia, there, she wonders where he got—

She sees his face.

_Alexei’s_ face.

“No,” she whispers, understanding suddenly. Her heart feels suddenly ripped to pieces, her throat full of thorns and dead petals. “_Bozhe moi._”

He shouldn’t have heard it. She knows he shouldn’t have. They’re good, but they’re not that good.

But Alexei’s always had a good sense of where she was, and he freezes in place, those beautiful eyes of his narrowing, growing cold. His eyes flick in her direction, and he pulls a gun out from his holster, stepping carefully along. Natasha holds in her laugh, because she can still hear his heavy footsteps. She always teased him for that, she knows. He sounded like a bear in a forest, growling and grunting, footsteps echoing.

She should go. She should leave. She must. Alexei has a life that doesn’t have room for her, and even if the manner of his leaving isn’t quite clear in her memory, the fact remains that he left. And she let him go. She should _go_, she’s too close to this for comfort. Barnes should be here, not her. Not her.

She climbs slowly down the tree, and holds her hands up, stays rooted to the ground as Alexei comes into view. God, he looks the same. It’s been so goddamn long but he still looks the _same_.

“Oh my god,” he says, almost dropping the gun in shock. “Natalya?”

“Hello, Alexei,” says Natasha, and somehow, she manages the Herculean effort of a wry smile. Like her stomach isn’t churning. Like her heart’s not shattering. Like she doesn’t want to throw her arms around him and kiss him, kiss him, kiss him. Here is her secret, in front of her, alive and well, but no longer hers. “You trimmed the beard, I see.”

“You dyed your hair,” he says. “Jesus. What’re you—no, don’t tell me. Old Cap and Bucky Barnes called you in?”

“Got it in one,” says Natasha. How long can she keep up her smile, she wonders. She knows the answer: as long as she needs to. “Let me guess, the Hawkins pack brought you in?”

“Sorta,” says Alexei. “My daughter, actually. Said she felt something off about some of the new neighbors, and then they turned out to be evil HYDRA goons, so.” He lowers the gun and takes his finger off the trigger, but doesn’t holster it again. “My god, ‘Talya. The hell are you doing out here by yourself, recon or something?”

“Originally, recon,” says Natasha. “What are you thinking going in there _alone_?”

And there’s that stubborn Alexei she knew, huffing and puffing, drawing himself up like a bear. “I’m not alone,” he says, and oh, that’s right. He brought people with him: two of the psychics at least, and at least five of the Hawkins pack. “Go back home, ‘Talya. Nothing the Black Widow can do here.”

“Then what’s the Red Guardian doing here?”

“I’m not the Red Guardian anymore,” says Alexei. “Haven’t been in a long time. I’m just Jim Hopper, and I’ve got a family to keep safe.”

He turns, and Natasha catches his sleeve. He stops and turns to look at her, surprised, lips parted. Once upon a time she would’ve sealed her lips over his and kissed him, and he would’ve kissed her back.

“Then I’m not the Black Widow,” she says, and knows it for a lie. She is never not the Black Widow, she fought too hard for the title not to keep it to herself. “I’m Natasha Romanov, and I’ve got a—a friend,” and it hurts, the way she expected it to, a dull pain that she has learned to live with now, “that I don’t want dead. I’m coming with you.”

“Why,” says Alexei (says Jim), and his eyes seem to glitter in the moonlight, the same way they had when she had kissed him and said _yes_, “I didn’t know we were friends.”

“I don’t have a lot of them,” says Natasha. “I protect the ones I do. You understand.”

“Yeah,” says Alexei, says her husband, says the man who once was Alexei and now is Jim Hopper, “I think I do.”


End file.
